


Batter Up

by toli-a (togina)



Category: Justified
Genre: 1980s, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-09
Updated: 2019-08-09
Packaged: 2020-08-13 19:53:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,932
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20179807
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/togina/pseuds/toli-a
Summary: Raylan takes aim at Dickie Bennett's knee. Maybe he's just tired of waiting. Maybe that's all.





	Batter Up

**Author's Note:**

> msindrad (FortuneSurfer) prompted, "I'd love to read your take on what it must've been like for Boyd when he found out about Raylan's altercation with Dickie Bennett." To which I responded: "This is a fascinating prompt to me, because my own personal headcanons are that a) Boyd is at the baseball game (he’s at all Raylan’s baseball games, obviously because he’s taking bets and earning money, and not because he’s Raylan Givens’s biggest fan), and b) Boyd never actually works for Bo. But putting aside personal headcanons is always fun, so have a short, off the top of my head ficlet about Boyd and Raylan after the momentous knee-shattering game." And this is what turned up.

Boyd strolled into his ancestral home just past the witching hour on a disappointingly uneventful Friday night. He rolled the bat his daddy gave him between his palms, tried to twirl it over the back of his hand and smacked it hard into the door frame instead, cursed at the bat and the door and the unexpected shock to his hand. Raylan always made it look like child’s play, could spin his bat like a baton, close his eyes and smirk while the damn thing danced through his hands.

“Where the hell have you been?” Bowman hollered, followed his voice down the stairs. Boyd jumped and cursed again. “Christ, I been waiting on you for hours.”

Boyd raised his eyebrows. He set the bat down in the entryway, tugged the pistol from the back of his jeans. “Now that’s mighty Christian of you, brother, to express such an overwhelming concern for my welfare. However -”

Bowman swatted at Boyd’s words with both hands, came near enough to smacking Boyd. “Don’t tell me you were out with Daddy’s deliveries ‘til now,” he said, looking angrier than was his right. “More like you were out sampling the best of the lot.”

“And if I was?” Boyd answered, folding his arms and holding the gun in clear view. “I fail to understand why my whereabouts this evening are of any relevance to you, little brother.”

“Jesus,” Bowman exploded, fierce enough to rock Boyd back on his heels. “I don’t give a fuck where you’ve been, Boyd. I just thought maybe you’d like to hear about how your friend Raylan Givens bashed in Dickie Bennett’s knee tonight, while you were out smoking Bennett weed.”

Boyd shook his head. He shook it again. When that didn’t have the desired effect, he reached out and attempted to shake Bowman instead.

“Bowman, don’t you presume that I won’t still thrash you, I find out you’re prevaricating just to sully Raylan Givens’s good name.”

Bowman had the audacity to smirk at that. He crossed his arms, the muscles in his shoulders shifting and dislodging Boyd’s hands like a horse shaking off flies. “Thought you’d want to know,” he said smugly. “Bottom of the fourth inning. They’re saying you could hear Bennett scream clear underground. Surprised _you _couldn’t hear it, wherever you were.”

Boyd bared his teeth at his brother, shoved the gun at him and hurried to fish his keys out of his pocket.

“They carted him off to the hospital, but the guys in the ambulance said Bennett ain’t ever gonna walk straight again. Said Givens must have one hell of a swing.”

The medics weren’t wrong. Coach had been saying that swing was Raylan’s ticket out of Harlan for four years. Coach clearly hadn’t assumed Raylan would use it to bat himself right into Mags Bennett’s line of fire.

“I don’t care where they took Dickie Bennett,” Boyd ground out, striding over to the telephone, picking up the receiver and slamming it back down. Arlo Givens wouldn’t take kindly to being woken up by a phone call, Boyd Crowder on the line requesting an audience with Arlo’s heir. “What about Raylan, Bowman?”

Bowman shrugged.

“They didn’t put him in an ambulance,” he clarified. “Didn’t arrest him, neither—everyone was fighting, by the time the sheriff came, and nobody pressing charges.” No, of course not. Mags wouldn’t report Raylan to the cops. That wasn’t the Harlan way. “Guess he went home.”

Boyd rapped his knuckles against the phone in a staccato rhythm, chewed on the inside of his lip and stared hard at the faded wallpaper in their kitchen.

“No,” he said finally, ignoring the little brother at his side. “He wouldn’t go home.”

“What, you think he stayed?” Bowman asked. “Wasn’t no one there gonna finish the game, Boyd.”

“Finish the game,” Boyd echoed, then snapped his fingers. “That’s it!” He patted Bowman on the cheek and turned for the door. “Dear brother, I am profoundly grateful to you for conveying the truth of this unfortunate episode. If Daddy inquires into my evening, you can inform him -”

“I ain’t telling him shit,” Bowman rumbled, and Boyd spared his brother an indulgent smile, his gaze and his steps and his mind already headed out the door to the truck and the road and beyond. “Tell him yourself.”

“I will surely do that,” Boyd agreed, slipping out the squeaking screen door. “You have a good night.”

Little League played all their games at Huff Park, just off 38. The field was dark, drenched with midnight dew, and completely empty. For one long moment Boyd thought he’d gotten it wrong somehow, paused with his fingers hooked into the fence and tried to think of where else on God’s green earth Raylan could possibly be. Then something shifted in the middle of the field, just off second base, and Boyd exhaled.

“I heard you had quite the evening,” he declared, walking the bases in slow, careful steps.

Raylan laughed, the sound of gears grinding under layers of rust. He didn’t lift his head, sprawled prone in the grass next to the base he’d played for nearly thirteen years. “Boyd Crowder,” he announced, as though Boyd was a debutante sweeping down the staircase at his first ball. “Did you hear? They’re saying it’ll be a miracle, Dickie ever walks straight again.”

“I heard,” Boyd affirmed lowly, dropping down to sit on second base. “Raylan Givens, what possessed you to cripple that boy’s knee?”

Raylan shrugged, lifting his shoulders and dropping them again, no more than a rough sketch of himself in the dark, illuminated by distant streetlights and Harlan stars. “Coach says it’s important to know when to swing.” He laughed at his own joke, rolled over onto his stomach and rested his chin on his hands, nothing but a corporeal shadow and the black powder flash of the smile he aimed at Boyd. “Guess I was tired of waiting,” he added, when Boyd didn’t return his grin.

“Huh,” Boyd sputtered inarticulately, because he knew better than to say, _If you’d waited just one more month, son, you’d have been signed to a college team and long gone_.

“No college recruiter in his right mind would take someone who goes around breaking knees,” Raylan said evenly, because Raylan Givens had been blessed with the unfortunate habit of reading Boyd Crowder’s mind. And it wasn’t supposed to be Raylan, swinging bats and breaking knees. It was never supposed to be Raylan, living like the true heir to the Givens name. “Ain’t never getting out of Harlan now.” Raylan shrugged, but he didn’t sound as concerned as he ought, didn’t sound heartbroken or devastated or anything like Boyd Crowder’s best friend in the world, who’d been bound and determined to get out of Harlan since the day he was born.

“I can assure you, Raylan, that your golden ticket is by no means the singular route out of this valley. Why, I’d hazard a guess that -”

Raylan twisted up to his knees while Boyd was talking, shuffled forward on them until he was directly between Boyd’s bent legs. Then he leaned forward and pressed his lips to Boyd’s mouth, caught Boyd’s teeth in the middle of a word, laughed right into Boyd’s mouth.

Boyd shoved him backwards, hard. Raylan went willingly, settled back on his heels—still in his uniform, his cleats caked in mud from the game—and grinned. Up close there was something wild in Raylan’s face, an edge to his smile and a starlit glint in his eyes that Boyd had never seen.

“What the hell was that?” Boyd demanded. He could feel his heartbeat jumping in his throat, making it impossible to swallow, blood pounding through his numb fingers and suddenly sweaty palms.

Raylan laughed. “What, Boyd, you ain’t never been kissed? And after all that time locked in the closet with Mary Beth Carter when we were fourteen.”

Boyd rubbed both hands over his face. He rested them on his knees, but they felt awkward and ungainly there. He crossed his arms for a moment and felt like his spinster Aunt Mabel trying to preserve her maidenhead. He uncrossed them and thought, just for a moment, about reaching out and wrapping his hands around Raylan Givens’s waist.

“I know what it was,” he finally said, solving the problem by plucking grass from the field and shredding it in his fingers. The field smelled familiar. Boyd had spent every summer of his life in Huff Park, playing outfield while Cousin Johnny practiced his pitching and Raylan honed his swing. “What the hell did you do it for, Raylan?”

This time Raylan leaned in slowly. He gave Boyd every chance to stop him, if Boyd cared to try. Boyd tore at the blades of grass in his hands and didn’t move an inch. “I don’t know,” Raylan said bluntly, with the same insouciance he’d shown when describing the state of his future or Dickie Bennett’s knee. “I guess I was tired of waiting,” he added, and leaned in for another kiss.

Boyd woke up with the birds, the sun still behind the mountains and grass poking his nose. Raylan was snoring softly beside him, sprawled out like a man with no cares in the world, like a boy who hadn’t shattered all his dreams the night before, like a boy who’d never leaped headlong into a tornado and kissed another boy.

Raylan Givens had always had his eye on the horizon. He wanted to leave Harlan. He wanted to play baseball. He wanted to be anything but his daddy’s son. Boyd looked at the young man sleeping beside him, traced the familiar angles and planes of his face, and felt terrifyingly unmoored.

“Are you watching me sleep?” Raylan mumbled, groaning a little as he stretched and popped his back after a night spent on the ground.

“I’m thinking,” Boyd told him.

“About what?” asked Raylan, rolling up to sit facing Boyd, their legs entangled. They’d sat like this for years, and Boyd had foolishly presumed it was the awkwardness of growth spurts or the comfort of a good friend. He hadn’t considered … he hadn’t realized what Raylan obviously had, that it had been this all along.

“About us? Boyd, it ain’t -”

“About your future, Raylan Givens,” Boyd interrupted, before Raylan could tell him just what it wasn’t that they were.

Raylan lifted one shoulder, dropped it with a sharp finality. “I don’t have a future, Boyd,” he said softly, and there was still something in his eyes when he looked at Boyd, something Boyd couldn’t name, when it was Boyd who knew every thought that had ever passed or might one day pass through Raylan Givens’s head. “So stop thinking.” Boyd opened his mouth to protest either the idea that he should stop thinking or the idea that Raylan had crushed his own future along with Dickie’s knee, never mind that Mags might well kill him before he turned nineteen. She’d have to go through Boyd Crowder, if she wanted to try. “Stop thinking,” Raylan repeated, “and come here and help me make good use of the now we’ve got.”

At any moment, Raylan could come to his senses. Another second of Boyd’s arguing and maybe he’d realize that he didn’t want to kiss any boy, and especially not Boyd Crowder, who’d missed Raylan’s game to go do his daddy’s dirty work. And if that was true, then the best option was to kiss Raylan while there was still time. The best option was to make good on the now that they’d got.


End file.
